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How Facebook Dynamic Ads Can Help You Boost Ecommerce Sales [+Free Guide]

Facebook Dynamic Ads are one of the most successful ad formats available today. These ads use a dynamic template, allowing them to draw product data from your entire product catalog and automatically generate product ads. That means brands, retailers, and advertisers of any kind can dynamically create ads and target users with relevant products based on their previous actions.

So how can you get started? Here are your first steps, what to do, how to target users throughout the funnel and successfully boost ecommerce sales.

Online advertising has come a long a way in the last few years:

On the one hand, Internet users are exposed to an increasing number of ads throughout the web, which has made it exponentially more difficult for advertisers to gain consumers’ attention and keep them engaged.

On the other hand, online retailers need to be more performance-driven than ever, looking to ensure they generate profitability and business growth.

For retailers, its most successful ad format is undoubtedly Product Catalog Sales, also known as “Dynamic Ads” (formerly “Dynamic Product Ads”).

What makes Facebook Dynamic ads unique?

Facebook is far from the only place for online retailers to push ads. So why do we talk about them like they’re the best thing since tabbed browsing? It’s because everything about Facebook Dynamic ads is unique.

Facebook Dynamic ads use data feeds to generate and serve up millions of unique ads. They funnel boring information like brand names and shipping information into interesting, gorgeous ads for Facebook users. These ads come in single-image, carousels, or collections.

More importantly, these ads can also be pushed to Instagram and audience networks. In the past, advertisers were often forced to dance around numerous sites and networks, as only so many ads can be pushed on one site without completely infuriating its user base. The Facebook audience network is the result of grassroot efforts to grow mobile and native ad networks, making advertisers happy without completely overstuffing spaces like Facebook and Instagram.

How can dynamic product ads boost ecommerce sales?

You can promote every single product from your catalog

Instead of creating an ad for each individual product, Facebook Dynamic Ads are generated for your entire inventory based on a scalable, dynamic template.

This means you only create one ad. Facebook then automatically draws the relevant information (e.g. titles, prices, and availabilities) from your product data feed to dynamically serve ads to specific audiences.

Facebook is an evergreen “always-on” channel, which means that once your campaign is set up, it can work without much required maintenance – so your product information will automatically be kept up-to-date.

These product ads will be shown to users most likely to buy from you

Facebook’s advertising formats offer remarkably advanced targeting capabilities thanks to a rich pool of audience information, detailed tracking and an intelligent algorithm that regulates ad delivery based on relevance for each user.

Dynamic ads carry this to the extreme: the adverts show the exact products the user has previously shown interest in. Thus, retailers can target with more precision than ever and are bound to see increases in conversion rates and revenue.

Retarget shop visitors at specific stages of the sales funnel

While traditional banner advertising tends to target random audiences, Dynamic Ads allow for increased flexibility. Apart from product interests, you can address users based on which stage of the sales funnel they are in. For example, after they view your product page, sign up for a newsletter, abandon their cart or complete a sale.

Hence, Facebook Dynamic Ads help you improve overall retail performance by enhancing every single step.

You can reach unique individuals across devices

One of Facebook’s many strengths is its ability to not only deliver perfectly tailored advertising on any device, but also to reach unique users across different devices. Basically, as long as a user is logged into Facebook, they can be reached with relevant ads, in the right format.

Campaign performance is all in your hands

Facebook offers a range of tools and features to monitor and optimize campaign performance, ad sets and ads. What’s more, they make it easy to understand your audiences both on Facebook and in your shop, to test which campaign settings work best and to find out how these settings impact your overall marketing and sales success.

Thanks to these options, marketers don’t have to sit and wait for their campaigns to work. They can actively make a positive impact on their campaigns’ outcome.

The importance of targeting

The most basic ad is generic and pushed to a wide, rather random audience. However, this “push it out there and cross your fingers” approach is becoming a thing of the past. Advertisers now have more tools than ever to locate and serve ads to the right audience. In fact, this is so commonly done that the basic, untargeted ad has become, in many ways, dead on arrival.

But where do you want to put your efforts? Perhaps sales is pushing for masterful product remarketing and results, but the marketing team needs fresh leads. Facebook offers an array of targeting tools, making it easy to target users at any stage of the funnel.

Find new leads

Facebook offers the basics, pushing ads to users based on demographics, interests, or behavior. You can even start with users of a certain age, then narrow your audience down to only those have made purchases or have visited a certain page or engaged in certain topics. It doesn’t get more targeted than that, does it?

Sometimes you have to get creative. Finding a desirable audience isn’t always clear cut. In fact, it can seem almost impossible at times to completely isolate what qualities will make a user valuable. Is it their location, affiliation to a team or topic, none of the above? All of the above?

Facebook Dynamic ads uses new tools like Lookalike audiences to find new users in a somewhat more holistic way. By levering information about your best customers, Facebook can locate never-before-considered target groups that share similar attributes. It’s unclear whether this is science, art, or black magic, but it’s bringing new users to stale audience lists.

Nurture

Retargeting is perhaps Facebook’s most beloved usage among marketers. This is likely because most of past ecommerce customers are on Facebook and they visit the site regularly. That means you can deliver targeted ads as necessary to keep those past buyers engaged and remind them you’re always there, waiting with more fabulous products.

There are several different directions marketers can choose to take, but they’ll often go one of these routes to nurture and retarget:

Cross-sell: This user just purchased a high-quality gaming headset? It’s time to send them information about related gear and promotions.

Up-sell: This user has already made a small purchase? Chances are, they’ll be curious to see some of your more exciting, higher margin products.

Remind: This user added products to their cart but stopped short? Send them a reminder about that product before they forget.

Close

Existing customers are known to spend more than new customers each visit and keep coming back. In fact, 65% of a company’s business will come from existing customers. Facebook allows marketers to go straight for the sale by uploading a customer file or offline data. Don’t forget, social media isn’t just about finding fresh, new prospects or reminding warm prospects: it offers marketers access to users in every stage of the funnel.

Why social retargeting matters (especially on this channel)

It now takes some dozen touchpoints in order to make a sale. Omnichannel, multichannel, they all require businesses to interact more creatively, consistently, and diversely with their audience. Social retargeting is one of the most popular places for marketers to reach users in their native habitat. Social media users will spend an average of over 2 hours each day on these channels. That’s a lot of ad opportunity.

Facebook, in particular, offers the unique opportunity to reach 1.4 billion users each day. In short, Facebook is key to increasing the number of touchpoints and reaching your target audience with powerful targeting and advertising tools. Without social retargeting, brands and retailers miss out on huge opportunities.

What do you need to get started with Dynamic Ads?

If you haven’t already done so, the first important step is to implement the Facebook pixel on your website or app. It allows you to track your visitors’ browsing behavior and interactions within your shop. You may have heard this also called the “retargeting pixel,” as this is what it’s used to support

Add at least these three events to your website or app:

View Content

Add To Cart

Purchase

However, there are many more you can add:

Even if you don’t start running campaigns immediately, the earlier you implement tracking, the more data you will be able to use for targeting the day you launch your ads.

2. A strong audience strategy

To get the most out of them for your business, you’ll need a plan of how the format will support your marketing strategy and which tactics will help you reach your goals. Take a look at the different stages of your conversion funnel to identify your weak points and unused potential.

Make sure you know who your buyer personas are. Find out more about their demographics, interests, and behaviors by searching for insights in your analytics data or in Facebook’s audience insight tool.

3. A product feed that follows Facebook’s requirements

To provide Facebook with the product content for your ads, you have to submit a product feed: a data file listing all of your products and their attributes (title, description, price, image link, etc.).

The product feed is a central component of Dynamic Ads, as it contains the content your created ads will be based on. To be able to upload it to Facebook, your feed must follow Facebook’s feed specifications. For your ads to perform well, also make sure your feed contains error-free, complete and attractive content.

Good to know: The attributes required for Facebook are very similar to the Google Merchant Center feed. If you are already selling on Google Shopping, you may want to read this post comparing Google Shopping and Facebook Dynamic Ads for product data feeds.

4. A set-up campaign in Facebook Ads Manager

And last but not least, you need to create a campaign on Facebook. Once you have selected “Product Catalog Sales” as a campaign objective, Facebook will take you through the workflow, which offers a broad variety of configuration settings such as target audiences, placements, budget and ad messages.

Yes, Facebook’s famous “dynamic ads” are simply the ad format used for the sales-related ad objective. That’s why they may seem difficult to locate and create at first. That also means, yes, you’ll only be using Dynamic ads for some kind of product adverts.

You’ll also want to consider the Marketing API. It offers the same tools you can get in Facebook’s usual interfaces, but it also offers more control. It’s generally used for optimizing different parts of your ads though better insights, audience management, and ad management.

Don’t forget: different ad options by industry

These ads were popularized for retail, but they quickly proved useful for businesses in all kinds of different industries. It started with travel. Dynamic ads for Travel now offer unique opportunities, while also requiring some extra product data and work. Brands and retailers in the following industries should check out Facebook’s Dynamic ads uniquely for you:

Travel (hotels, flights, destinations)

Real estate

Automotive

When in doubt, consider the ad templates!

Facebook Dynamic ads’ rapidly growing popularity is in large part due to its automated, highly objective and analytical features. This makes it easy to forget the single most important piece of the puzzle: the ad itself.

Once you have your numbers and quantitative results in hand, always return to your ad. Consider exactly where your copy will go and how the creative can be used to make the ad more click-worthy.

As powerful as Facebook Dynamic ads can be, a poorly crafted ad won’t make up for any amount of data and research. No matter how great or well-targeted the product is, it’s still an ad. That means, if you want to boost ecommerce sales, you’ll need to focus on making it fabulous.

Always consider the data submitted in your product feed and ensure that it’s optimized for the user as well as Facebook.